


scenes from a north London seder

by nnozomi



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Gen, Judaism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-23
Updated: 2013-09-23
Packaged: 2017-12-27 09:43:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/977293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nnozomi/pseuds/nnozomi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It would have been enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	scenes from a north London seder

**Author's Note:**

> So Philomytha was saying she wanted more Rivers of London fic, and I thought I’d like to write something for the Days of Awesome, and this happened. (I didn’t actually file it under the collection, since it doesn’t quite fit the specifications, and I didn’t even choose the right festival for the season. I don’t know…).  
> Set between _Whispers Underground_ and _Broken Homes_ , with no obvious spoilers for the latter.

Ironically enough, Nightingale and his apprentices are eating roast pork in cream sauce when Peter raises the subject. “I had a call from DS Stephanopoulos today.”

“Yes?” If it was an incident requiring the urgent assistance of a practitioner, Peter wouldn’t be sitting here frowning at his Brussels sprouts, with cream sauce on his tie.

“She wanted to know if we’ve got plans for next Friday. The three of us,” he clarifies. “For dinner. Well, not dinner exactly…”

“What then?” Lesley wants to know.

“Don’t remember what she called it. Turns out her, er, her partner’s Jewish and they have a thing next week? Like Easter, only not Easter?”

“Passover,” Nightingale supplies. “The Sergeant and her partner are holding a Seder?”

“That’s it, right. And they want us to come if we’re free. Just us, I guess, they have family on other nights or something.”

“I would think so. Well. Unless you have scruples of belief, I suggest we accept the invitation.”

“You don’t go to church, do you, sir?” Peter’s curiosity has found an outlet as usual.

“Not since school, when chapel was compulsory. No.” Not since the war, but that they can work out for themselves. “And the two of you?”

Lesley rolls her eyes. “My Mum and Dad haven’t missed Sunday services since the church was founded, I reckon. My Dad sleeps like a baby every time an’ all. I got let out when I joined the fuzz.”

Nightingale wonders how the good Anglicans of Brightlingsea would deal with Lesley in her mask.

“Mum goes until she’s quarreled with the latest pastor, Dad reckons he can’t be doing with church music,” Peter volunteers. “Fair enough, his ideas of religion mostly have to do with original Clifford Brown vinyl…yeh. Anyway, I guess you’re allowed to come to this whatsit, Passover, even if you’re not Jewish, so off we go?”

“Why not,” Lesley shrugs. “Has _anyone_ ever set eyes on Stephanopoulos’ partner yet?”

“It would be a shame to turn down the invitation,” Nightingale concurs. “I may ask the two of you to do some extra reading this week, for the sake of your broader education. Jewish traditional magic, while not Newtonian as we know it, has interesting points of similarity…”

“Have we got to learn _Hebrew_ now?”

“It wouldn’t do you any harm,” he says drily, and smiles into his Brussels sprouts.

 

Her Indoors turns out to be named Tamar. Stephanopoulos’ age or perhaps a bit older, she is a short, wide-hipped, heavy-breasted woman with a great mass of greying chestnut hair pinned up in a swirl, slow-moving and slow-speaking in a way that makes it pleasant to wait for each gradually appearing word or gesture. She has on a wide white wrap-around top (“as close as I’m prepared to come to the traditional white robe”) and indigo linen pants, admits to a day job as an administrator at a girls’ grammar school, and lives with Stephanopoulos in a large cedar-paneled house with a generous garden and teetering stacks of books everywhere.

“I wouldn’t tell my family Miriam’s last name for ever so long,” she says, after they’ve all introduced themselves. “My mum and dad were delighted, thinking I was with a nice Jewish girl. When my great-aunt Raizel asked straight out, I told her it was Miriam Krone.”

After a moment, Nightingale chuckles as the languages fall together in his head. Stephanopoulos wrinkles her nose, the only time he’s seen the expression used to show affection. Peter and Lesley are exchanging glances which he can read just as easily: _what’s the joke? don’t ask me, mate._ It’s getting to be past time he started them on a bit of Greek.

They’ve dressed up a bit. Nightingale has taken care with his pale grey suit and waistcoat, a dark red silk tie and pocket square. Peter, whose formal wardrobe remains regrettably sparse, has compromised on dark slacks and a white shirt; his tie is a brilliant satsuma color, which looks somehow less gaudy than it ought to thanks to the contrast with his dark skin. Lesley is in a tight red dress with a full, kneelength skirt, which she has altered from what Nightingale believes Peter would call “clubbing gear” to an appropriate garment by the simple addition of a short, lacy white cardigan. Allowing for her mask, she looks beautiful.

Outside the last of the twilight has fallen, and they begin: candles lit with Tamar’s sure hand and voice, the first cup of a sweet red wine. Nightingale wishes momentarily he could bring a glass of it home to Molly, and suppresses an inward shudder.

The small rituals (he has a hard time not hearing them as spells) continue, and Tamar begins the Passover story and explains the Seder plate to her Gentile guests. “Bitter herbs,” she recites precisely, her plump hand hovering over the plate, “charoset, parsley, sweet potato, roast egg, salt water, matzoh, oranges.”

The elements of the plate fascinate him; if this isn’t a spell, he doesn’t know what is. A spell in a variety of magic that bears the same relation to his own craft as Hebrew to Latin, surely. Sharp pale horseradish, sweet dark charoset, deep green parsley and purple-skinned yam, smooth white egg under its browned and crackling shell, glass dish of salt water (the blue pattern on the plate ripples through the double translucence), neat rectangles of matzoh, and three orange slices nestled together. Two have had every bit of rind and pith removed, leaving only the flesh itself, glowing like a stained glass window, one true orange and one the vivider color of a blood orange; the third is dark chocolate, its shape faithfully imitating the tree-grown fruit. These make him smile to himself; the other elements hold him taut with their potential, as if he were looking at a plate laid with formae.

There were Jewish boys at school, not quite shunned but still inevitably non-U, as Miss Mitford put it later. He remembers Rosenberg, overweight and hopeless at rugby but a dogged victor at Indoor Tennis, and Ackerley who went to chapel every week with the rest of them but was still, universally, known to be a Jew, and West, mad on art and antiques, who was so ugly that you somehow couldn’t help liking him. (Rosenberg died early in the war, perhaps a saving grace for him. West broke his staff so conclusively that Nightingale has never dared wonder what became of him afterward. Ackerley vanished, dead or simply broken.) He never knew any of them to use magic different from what they all learned in class. Might Newtonian practitioners also practice the Kabbalah? How much had been lost for good—or hidden when trust was abandoned after the unbombed railway lines—with the six million?

 

When he emerges from his thoughts, it’s time for what Tamar calls “hiding the afikoman,” and Nightingale finds himself elected _in loco parentis_ , or rather _patris._ Gravely, Tamar instructs the “children” to close their eyes as she hands him the fragment of matzoh. Stephanopoulos looks mildly amused, the way she does when some hapless constable is struggling to muster an excuse for his latest minor idiocy.

Nightingale thinks for a moment, considering the appropriate formae and his apprentices’ state of Latin, and then takes a breath and says quietly “ _Sacculus aeri domini manu astrictus.”_

Peter frowns; Lesley tilts her head slightly to one side. The matzoh disappears under his hand, and he says “Whenever you’re ready.”

“Seems like cheating,” Stephanopoulos observes.

“Not if they’ve been doing their homework, Miriam.” He is pleased to see that both the young ones have better manners than to groan out loud while guests at another’s table, even if only just.

 

Tamar’s storytelling reaches a natural pause, and Stephanopoulos squints balefully at Peter and Lesley. “Show me your warrant cards.”

Peter blinks. Lesley reaches calmly into the front of her dress, making Peter blink faster, and produces the card; Stephanopoulos has to snap her fingers before Peter manages to do the same, finding his in a more conventional hip-pocket location.

“Grant eighteen-five-eighty-four, May eleven-eleven-eighty-three,” she reads off rapidly. “Fine. He’ll do the questions, Tama.”

“I’ll do the what?”

“You could have just asked them for their birthdates, love,” Tamar says, creating the effect of a smile even though her face is serious. Stephanopoulos snorts, handing back the cards. To Peter she gives in addition a small square of cream writing paper.

“There are four questions—five, really—traditionally asked at the Seder,” Tamar explains. “The youngest person at the table always asks them. It’s usually a child, of course…”

Lesley’s smirk is unmistakable, mask or no mask. To Nightingale’s relief, Peter manages to remember his manners and bite down on whatever cheeky remark he is inevitably thinking of. “Now?” he asks meekly, and begins. “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

The way the questions are posed sounds entirely familiar to Nightingale; he’s been asking rhetorical questions like this of Lesley and Peter for the length of their apprenticeships, pushing them to understand the formal framework of Newtonian magic. He wonders if there are Jewish children who take to their religion with the same relentless enthusiasm for experimentation that Peter has brought to his studies; momentarily he’s gifted with a vision of a little skullcapped boy, or perhaps pigtailed girl, eagerly multiplying the four questions to eight or sixteen or possibly sixty-four, while his or her family sniff longingly at the delicious scents drifting in from the kitchen and grandfather the rabbi smiles.

The third question of the four nearly trips Peter up—his voice wavers dangerously, and Nightingale can see him absolutely refusing to meet Lesley’s eye—but he manages to get through without quite abandoning his dignity altogether.

When Tamar tells the story of the four sons--the wise son, the wicked son, the simple son, and the son who does not know to ask--Nightingale thinks of his motley charges at the Folly. Toby is certainly simple as only an animal can be, and bless him for it, tiresome as the daily canine requirements can become. Molly in her eternal silence does not know to ask—or perhaps knows not to, but he may never see through her to her answers.

Wise and wicked…he thinks of Peter’s injunction against “black magicians.” That inadvertent pun can’t be enough to make Peter the wicked son, and there is no room in Tamar’s Haggadah for the son who is feckless, cheeky, ungrammatical, slow to learn thanks to his obsession with scientific practice, regrettably susceptible to beautiful women, fundamentally kind, thoughtlessly brave, and occasionally brilliant. But are Lesley’s calm under fire, her skill on the practice range, and her way of most often having the jump on Peter enough to make her the wise child?

 

“Dayenu, it would have been enough,” they sing, the visitors picking up the simple tune. Tamar has a light, sweet alto voice and Stephanopoulos, incredibly, a lyrical soprano. Nightingale is fairly sure the look she casts Peter between verses means that there is one more joke about DS Stephanopoulos which will exist but never be told (Schrödinger’s joke, he wonders, regretting that he’s not likely to be able to bring himself to share with Peter this modest witticism of his own). Peter himself has apparently acquired enough of his father’s musicianship to sing in tune; Nightingale would have expected him to be a tenor, but he has an unexpectedly deep, grainy bass-baritone, not at all unpleasant. Nightingale adds his own choirboy-trained tenor to the mix and doesn’t look at Lesley. (“I’m tone-deaf anyway, me,” she says later, and he isn’t sure how true it is.)

As they sing he’s intent on distinguishing the voices and following the silly, rocking-horse tune, but after the last verse has bounced to a conclusion Nightingale looks down at the text and feels his throat tighten. “It would have been enough, if he had only…” The song is thanking their God for doing _more_ than he had to, going above and beyond, showering blessings on the Jews; but to the man he has been since Ettersberg, the text sounds more like a cry of frustration. If only a smattering of magic had been left to them, it would have been enough. If only a few comrades had been able to return to the Folly with him, it would have been… If only…

He startles in the silence around the table. Tamar’s seat is empty; when did she get up and leave? How long has he been caught in his reverie of impossible regrets? Before he can react, though, she comes back into the room in a slow-motion swirl of white shawl. “A favorite book of mine,” she murmurs, holding up a battered paperback too briefly for him to read the title on the cover. “Today the _Dayenu_ reminded me of a line here—where—drat—got it.” She pauses for a moment, and begins to read in the same slow rich cadence in which she read the Hebrew.

“Alone! Master of the Universe, if only one of them had been spared, I would have had someone to talk to. Only one… Was that too much to ask? One… We could have talked about what happened… But there is no one to talk to …”

Through tears that he has just enough control not actually to let fall, Nightingale looks around the table. Tamar has stopped reading aloud, but her eyes are on her book. Stephanopoulos’ stillness has all the weight and yet implied, potential motion and power of a marble lion. Lesley is looking at the Seder plate, her blue eyes clear and calm.

Peter is watching him, his face stiff with what might be concern or anger or unspoken thoughts that Nightingale still can’t imagine at all, because he and his latterday apprentice have, in the end, nothing they can hold in common, nothing, except the light opening from their hands—

The thought of _Lux_ is, as it has been for many years, a route to calm, the cool light illuminating the shadows in the corners of his mind. _Pull yourself together, Thomas_. He thinks again, for a moment, of Peter the black magician, and wonders about minds where the little-used forma _Tenebra_ might soothe a cruel light.

 

Lesley takes a tiny token bite of the horseradish and matzoh “sandwich” and tries not to wince; Peter, raised on the red palm oil and Scotch bonnets of Sierra Leone, doesn’t bat an eye. Exiles, Nightingale thinks, perhaps need the extra stimulus of spice to keep memories alive. He himself has eaten stranger things than this in the pursuance of his duty, and the meal that comes next—brisket, potatoes roasted with mint, endives and a sweet carrot soup he’s never come across before—is delicious.

“Miriam’s cooking,” Tamar says with pleasure when he praises the food, and Stephanopoulos grunts.

“Keep it for special occasions. No time most days.”

“She’s going to retire and start a restaurant some day,” Tamar says fondly, and Peter chokes on a mouthful of potato. Lesley smacks him across the back of the head.

“Not for a while, I hope,” Nightingale says to Stephanopoulos, under cover of his apprentices’ tumult. “DCS Seawoll would be lost without his right hand, not to mention the rest of us.” Stephanopoulos grunts again and mutters something impolite about Alexander Seawoll, but he can see she’s not displeased.  

 

“What about the hidden thing?” Lesley wants to know, sounding a good deal younger than her age. “When do we get to find it?”

“Now. If you know where to start…?” Tamar’s face is bright with curiosity.

“Say the spell again, sir,” Peter demands.

Nightingale obliges, this time careful not to inflect the words with virtue. After a frantic burst of whispering between the two apprentices, and one quick illicit consultation of a telephone screen that they may be fooling themselves he hasn’t seen or understood (he has grasped by now that a mobile might hold a dictionary, whatever they think of him), Peter develops a wide grin and Lesley’s eyes gleam.

“Your hand, sir,” his apprentice says, with deliberate formality. Nightingale matches gesture to words, holding out one hand to each of them. As Lesley’s warm fingers and Peter’s cool ones close on his own, wise and wicked together, the matzoh falls neatly out of the air under his palm. Normally Lesley would be the quicker of the two, but tonight she’s had her share of the sweet wine, and she laughs in delight and lets it fall as Peter dives for it. He snatches it from the air just before it can hit the ground, looking up triumphantly, and Nightingale says “Well done.”

 

On their way home Lesley’s giggly, leaning against Peter. “Why is this Nightingale different from all other Nightingales?” she wonders aloud, not quite slurring the words, and Peter strangles on a whoop of laughter.

Nightingale, who hasn’t been able to get really drunk for longer than he cares to remember, flinches painfully at the absurd question, at all the terrible, possible answers to it that he’s been brooding over for half a century. _If only_ , he thinks again, in the words of the Seder song, and finds himself struggling to finish the sentence, unsure whether to count blessings or curses. If only the magic had stayed longer. If only the magic had returned. If only one friend had been left to him. If only one apprentice had been given to him.

Nightingale is not a man given to thanking, or abusing, his God. He leaves that to Tamar and her beliefs, to the demi-mondaines and theirs. Tonight he steadies his wobbling apprentices with a gentle hand on each shoulder, and thinks _If only_ one more time, and smiles. 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Kind readers, please correct me as needed on the following:  
> \--Latin. I did study it once. Many years ago.  
> \--British/American. I’m usually confident in my self-Brit-picking (with the exception of “color/colour” issues, which trouble me less), but careless Americanisms in this fandom seem especially unfortunate.  
> \--Order and content of the Seder. I was raised a very unobservant Jew, and had to look most of it up afresh. (Tamar’s plate uses a yam instead of a lamb bone for the pun, and orange slices per Susannah Heschel’s queer/feminist interpretation. The chocolate orange, presumably a fancy version with no corn syrup, is my own variation.)  
> \--Tamar’s quotation is from Chaim Potok’s _The Promise_ , a book I much prefer to its better-known prequel _The Chosen_. I dithered long and hard over whether to include this quotation and finally did so, but if you know it and find its use here inappropriate, please let me know and I will remove it immediately.  
>  Thank you for reading.


End file.
